Top-Down Effects on Multiple Meaning Access within and between Languages.

Spoken Word Recognition;Eye Movements;Lexical Processing;Bilingualism;Lexical Ambiguity Resolution;Psychology;Social Sciences;Psychology

Zeidler, Lillian ChenLewis, Richard L. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Spoken Word Recognition;    Eye Movements;    Lexical Processing;    Bilingualism;    Lexical Ambiguity Resolution;    Psychology;    Social Sciences;    Psychology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/61551/lillianc_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This research investigates context effects on multiple meaning access during wordrecognition.Previous monolingual word recognition research suggests that multiple meaningsof homographs are temporarily activated. In disambiguating context, Reordered Accesspredicts multiple meaning activation, while Selective Access predicts single meaningactivation. The difference arises from differences in their predictions for contextuallyinappropriatemeanings: Reordered Access predicts no context effects, and SelectiveAccess predicts suppression due to context. Two eyetracking during listeningexperiments showed that top-down context both increased activation of the appropriatemeaning of a homophone and decreased activation of the inappropriate meaning,however, multiple meanings were still activated. Thus, a strict form of neither ReorderedAccess or Selective Access can account for the present results.Most previous research on context effects on homophone resolution assumed thatparticipants fully engaged in the sentence processing tasks and fully understood thesentence contexts. However, if this assumption is invalid, the conclusions of previousstudies may also be invalid. Two naming experiments investigated motivational effects(monetary compensation, supervision, feedback) on homograph meaning resolution. Theresults indicated that participant motivation increased overall task performance, but didnot reliably affect homograph meaning activation.Previous bilingual research has found that word-initial cohort competitors frommultiple languages are activated, even in monolingual contexts. BIA+ and BIMOLA bothaccount for multiple language activation, but differ in how context affects the nontargetlanguage. BIA+ assumes that lexicons of multiple languages are integrated; contextaffects words in both languages simultaneously. In contrast, BIMOLA assumes thatlexicons of multiple languages are stored in different language networks; context effectscan be selective to one language. Three eyetracking-during-listening experiments showedthat biasing context increased activation of the target language meaning, but did notaffect the nontarget language activation. Thus, context effects on multiple languageactivation are language-selective, although multiple languages are activated, supportingthe BIMOLA.The present set of experiments demonstrated that regardless of surroundingcontext, multiple meanings and multiple languages are activated. Biasing context plays arole in modulating lexical activation, both facilitating appropriate meanings andinhibiting inappropriate meanings. However, context effects modulate meaning activationonly in the target language.